e and on the other. They promised the Socialist regime, and
they have only destroyed the production of the factories so as to
leave the population without product and throw the workers into an
army of unemployed; the horrible specter of famine occupies the
void left by the broken organizations of food-supply; millions of
the money of the people are squandered in maintaining a Red
Guard--or sent to Germany to keep up the agitation there, while
the wives and the widows of our soldiers no longer receive an
allowance, there being no money in the Treasury, and are obliged
to live on charity.

The Russian country is threatened with ruin. Death knocks at the
doors of the hovels of the workmen.

By what forces have the Bolsheviki thus killed our country? Twelve
days before the organization of the autonomous administration was
achieved and the elections to the Constituent Assembly begun, at
the time when there had been organized all the autonomous
administrations of volosts, districts, governments, and cities,
chosen by equal, direct, and secret universal suffrage, thus
assuring the realization of the will of the people and justifying
the confidence of the population--even then they seized the power
and established a regime which subjects all the institutions of
the country to the unlicensed power of the Commissaries of the
People. _And these Commissaries rely upon the Soviets, which were
chosen at elections that were carried out according to rank, with
open balloting and inequality of vote, for therein the peasants
count only as many representatives as the workmen of the cities,
although in Russia their number is sixty times greater_.

Absence of control permits every abuse of power; absence of secret
voting permits that into these Soviets at these suspicious
elections some enter who are attracted by the political role of
these institutions; the defeat of inequality in the suffrage
restrains the expression of the will of the peasants, and,
accordingly, these cannot have confidence in this system of
government. The tyranny that presided at these elections was such
that the Bolsheviki themselves pay no attention to the results,
and declare that the Soviets that are opposed to themselves are
bourgeoisie and capitalists. We, representing the peasant workers,
must declare in the name